This post is going to be difficult for me to write coherently, so I’ve included a video of yours truly rambling out a number of ideas.  This is really my first web video update since my dorm room at Duke became a stage – well this time it’s Hammock’s Coffee – a great little spot just a jog from where I live in North Raleigh.  If you’re ever in RTP come and check them out.

Those old YouTube videos are still floating out there, and they were a part of SelfReliant back in the day of the Freewebs homepage, and when the logo was graced with the eery yet hopeful stride of the disembodied running legs – which my graphic designer was concerned projected a bit too masculine of an image…right on of course.  Which is why SelfReliant was made officially gender-neutral with the entrance of the “BlueStairs” logo:
TRANSFORMS INTO…

Quite miraculous of course!  And BlueStair has made quite a splash already in Second Life, where he has been transformed into an avatar:

Enough about BlueStairs though!  That androgenous critter’s just an attention-hog.  We have a long boring list of things to cover in this video so let’s hop to it – no, just kidding, it’s an action-packed video of me talking in a coffee shop about Edupunk, the New Media Consortium, and the University of Southern Queensland.  Oh, and how SR might fit into the whole mess.  Enjoy!

*recording video – check back soon*

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I’d like to invite everyone to go ahead and take a look at this video:

Screen Shot of John Reese's Video - Go Check it Out

It’s not the most scientific video, and it is a 67 minute commitment, but this technique has already been useful for me.  I think the #1 problem with being a self-educator in a world of information overload is that our heads get filled – this is basically a technique for doing a comprehensive “brain dump”.

Even more significantly, John Reese recommends in the video to break your brain dump into 3 parts:  you tasks, your desires, and your fears.  This is an important technique, because it’s at the very least a modern manifestation of the ancient wisdom:  Know Thyself.

Wikipedia photo of Know Thyself in the original Greek on a stained glass window

So go ahead and reboot your brain.  Just as a rose bush can grow more rigorously once it’s pruned, this process allows you to clear your mind and then let reorganization and defragmentation occur.  It is a stepping stone we all must take on our personal intellectual trajectory.  Good luck!

Self-Educators’ Rules for 2009 and Beyond In light of this video, I’m proposing some basic rules of the road for this fast-paced society we now inhabit:

1.  Work Faster (or Embrace the Automated Middleman)

• The first thing we must understand is that whatever we are doing can probably already be done faster and cheaper.  Seek out and do not be afraid of automated marketplaces and middlemen!  If you’re a graphic designer, you should be aware of 99designs.com, if you’re a stock market analyst then you should be aware of Collective2.com, if you’re a banker then you should be very aware of Prosper.com, LendingClub.com, VirginMoney, and Loanio.com.  As a self-educator in the 21st century, you need to constantly be looking for “automated middlemen” to reach people with your “public homework”.  Public homework is just a term for your “work in progress” – put everything out there, learn and grow from what you get back, and then do it all over again, in real-time.  Blogging, twittering, vlogging, or lifecasting…whatever you want to call it, we have to push content, services, and products out ASAWPI (As Soon As We Produce It).  Because engaging the feedback loop is how we educate ourselves in the 21st century.  If you think getting a degree from an accredited university means you’re an empowered self-educator who is learning at 21st century speed, you are dead wrong. Universities teach early 20th century speed learning at best, 18th century speed at worst, and from the looks of this video, that’s just not going to cut it.

2.  Live Slower (or Become an Authentic Content Producer)

• Being an Internet self-educator is not about SEO, Google traffic, or getting eyeballs on your blog to click your advertising – it’s not about business, that’s why I’ve chosen the motive-neutral term “Microenterprise” rather than “Microbusiness” or “Microcharity”.  Being an Internet self-educator is a powerful modern way to embody the age-old tradition of the life-long learner, the Renaissance polymath, and the creative, inquisitive, independent thinker.  To be authentic, and true to your own intellectual trajectory, you must slow down your life, even as your ability to do work speeds up.  We must occasionally detach from hype, groupthink, and both mainstream and social media in order to develop a voice uniquely our own.  Have a rich and unique view on living and on the world, but consult Rule #1 to project that powerful point of view.

3.  Know What You Want

• A lot of people want to believe they know what you want – teachers, marketers, salespeople, the government.  Heck, even I think I have some idea what you and others want.  (In case you wondering, I think you want to be a better self-educator online…)  But you can’t listen to everyone and get anywhere useful from a vast milieu of opinion and speculation.  Listen to yourself.  It’s one of life’s great mysteries that we end up liking the subjects that we like.  Some people love math, and hate foreign languages, while others love foreign languages but can’t stand analyzing poetry and literature.  I’m passionate about molecular biology – I’d sit and read research papers and books on the subject whether someone was accrediting me to do it or not.  Identify your interests and have the courage to immerse yourself in those things you find most intellectually stimulating – never be afraid to work hard at something you enjoy!

4.  Know Why You Want It

• If Rule #3 left you thinking, “I want money” or “I want tons of friends” – think hard why you want what you want.  Don’t deny your desires, those are part of who you are right now, but try to understand yourself in a deeper context.  Society today can be pretty oberwhelming and impersonal, make sure you make time to figure out the big questions, like why you’re here on earth, and what you can give to other that comes uniquely from you.  You may find your purpose is to pioneer life-saving medical research, or to help more people become debt free.  Whatever your mission, in this day and age, you’ll have to be prepared to act on that mission much faster, more efficiently, and impact more people.  The Internet allows magnified projection of the best and the worst in our society – why are you making the contribution you are making?  Does it represent the best you have to offer the world right now?

5.  Don’t Learn How to Get It, Hyper-Learn How to Get It

• OK, so you know you like (fill in the blank) and you want to be a successful at (fill in the blank) and impact the world in a positive (fill in the blank) way.  Awesome!  Um, how do you do it?  Be Resourceful. More specifically, it’s not good enough to learn how to become a French chef, or an airplace pilot, or a patent attorney.  You have to “hyper-learn”. This is a mashup of the term “hyperlink”, which connects information and data within its particular context, and learning.  Hyper-learning is the act of pinpointing what  you don’t know using the Internet, and deliberately learning it as you determine you need it. Schools today teach knowledge far in advance of when that knowledge is going to actually be used, so it becomes outdated or forgotten before use.  Hyper-learning needs to happen within the context of a project.  When you don’t know how to use a piece of software, you should get really good at figuring out Help files and other available documentation.  Ask the right questions, and you’ll pinpoint what it is you don’t understand, then identify the right resources and digest them on the spot.  This is hyper-learning, and it’s a big part of the reason that self-education has become a viable alternative to institutional education in the 21st century.

6.  Educate Everywhere

• If you haven’t figured out yet, I don’t like the words “teacher” or “student”.  The SelfReliant community is going to be one instead of Catalysts and Self-Educators.  The reason for this reversal of terms is the hierarchy implied by our traditional verbiage.  The object of a teacher is always the student, who is presumed to have a greater knowledge deficit than the teacher.  A catalyst on the other hand can easily be a self-educator and a self-educator can easily be a catalyst, quite often at the exact same time.  Education can be ubiquitous in the 21st century, and it is our responsibility as a community to make it so.  Never limit yourself to your own learning, but constantly seek out opportunities to catalyze learning in others.  The rate at which we must switch between being the student and being the teacher in such a complex society makes it imperative that we embrace not only our own life-long learning journey, but to accept responsibility for assisting others in their learning journey.

7.  Don’t Stop or Slow Down for Bureaucracy

• We must recognize when institutional inertia and bureaucracy are slowing down learning unnecessarily.  The imperative should always be learning, and speeding along one’s own intellectual journey authentically and enthusiastically.  Learning is fun!  Discovery is a gift!  Talents ought not be wasted! Let’s not confuse the machinations of large educational institutions, or the hoop-jumping of certification entities as any sort of substantive reflection on the beauty of learning.  Educational facilities today have very little to do with learning, and much more to do with the quality assurance and filtering functions of accreditation.  If they throw up roadblocks on your journey that are impassable, then stop trying; circumvent them, don’t engage them – they will one day either become obsolete or forced to change to meet the needs of the modern self-educating community.

8.  Aim to Have 100 Microenterprises by 2010 (or Employment is Old Social Technology)

• I’d like to announce here that my first e-book, Microenterprise Education, will be published and put up for sale on the website this February.  Please stay tuned for it…  A microenterprise is what the user of a Web 2.0 application actually does with that application.  For example, let’s say I want to teach myself advanced graphic art.  After a period of self-study, I could start 2 microenterprises on CafePress.com and Lulu.com – selling prints of my graphic art, and t-shirts with the art on display.  Whether the enterprise makes money or not, it has the capacity to generate a lot of feedback that will help me understand how others feel about my artistic productions.  Given this feedback, I can take my self-study in new directions, and ultimately engage in the feedback loop that is diagrammed on the front page of SelfReliantLLC.com.  By 2010, you should have at least 100 different registered and active accounts on a wide array of Web 2.0 and social networking platforms. These are your microenterprises, and the more you do with them, the more you’ll learn and grow.  As far as employment is concerned, it may be best to talk about that in another post.  But in the meantime go read the book Free Agent Nation by Daniel Pink and you’ll understand why working for a single employer for most of your life is a way of life fast going extinct.

9.  Take Care of Your Physical Health

• This is perhaps the most important rule of all – and the rule that’s been hardest for me (being a keyboard-bound nerd) to follow.  The importance of technology to the knowledge economy has made it far too easy to spend entire days in front of the laptop that might otherwise be spent at some more mobile activity; playing tennis, working out at the gym, or just enjoying some fresh air outside.  There’s abundant research to suggest that getting exercise everyday is healthy, but I think even more significantly, sweating a little bit every day from some physical activity can go a long way to relieve stress and detoxify the body.  There’s also never been as much free information available in history on good nutritional habits – look for it online, and be watchful to separate the quality information from the random speculation, or worse yet, outright quackery.  Your mind is part of your body; take care of your body and it will return the favor!

10.  Take Care of Your Mental Health

• We live in a powerfully stimulating society.  Rewatch the video at the beginning of this post in case you don’t know what I’m referring to.  Information overload is an entirely normal experience today – not so for our ancestors.  Proper care for one’s mental health starts by acknowledging that nobody is perfect and infinitely capable to cope.  Make sure you have a support group, your family and friends, or members of a faith, can be a stabilizing influence.  Anxiety is the unfortunate flipside to intellectualism and intelligence, and it has become more common than ever for people today to complain of some sort of stress-related mental or physical problem.  A cup of tea, some exercise, and plenty of sleep can go a long way toward smoothing out nerves.  Do the online research first before looking for some sort of pharmaceutical quick fix, even if it’s doctor-recommended, because getting a second and third opinion is the most basic defense patients have against bad advice.

OK everyone, those are the Self-Education Community’s “Rules of the Road” for 2009.  If you’re not sure if these rules apply to you, then think again, we’re really all self-educators one way or another – we do it whenever we follow our passions and learn, as physicist Richard Feynman said, for the pleasure of finding things out.

CHEA Conference 2009

Before you read any further you may be wondering what CHEA is (unless of course you are one of the members who also attended the conference).  CHEA stands for the “Council on Higher Education Accreditation” and is the non-profit, non-governmental, national organizing body for the regional accreditors in the US.  As I understand it, CHEA doesn’t accredit, but rather serves as an organizer – of events such as the conference in DC that occurred January 26th-29th.  If you’d like to know more about CHEA check out their website at CHEA.org

Co-founder Carolyn Meyer and I made our way up the coast Monday night, and stayed just about a half mile from the Omni Shoreham hotel, where the event was held.  The conference was in all ways thought-provoking and exceedingly useful, as we got the opportunity to speak to university administrators and accreditors about our ideas about accrediting online self-education.  My general feeling was that what we hope to accomplish in the long-term can be accomplished; namely, an infrastructure for self-driven intellectuals in our society to have their academic interests converted by an authoratative body into transferable college credit – whether or not they ever attend a formal institution.

The ability for the Internet to record and catalogue information brings us a very long way toward achieving that goal, but the accrediting piece of the puzzle had always been the most obvious stumbling block.

Ultimately, I’d just like to thank CHEA for making the conference open to any attendee who can afford the registration, as opposed to limiting it simply to member institutions.  In the future I hope they’ll be able to open up attendance even further to include students, which a number of speakers at the conference were so eloquently calling for already.

Now I have to get back to adding all my CHEA contacts to LinkedIn and Plaxo.  Thanks again for your supportive comments and ideas during the conference.

Those of you who know me know that I love Second Life and immersive 3D virtual worlds in general, such as the open source project Croquet/Cobalt being spearheaded at my very own Duke University. Check those guys out whenever you get a chance.

But while we’re waiting for some solid open- or closed-source competitors, I’m going to be sticking to Second Life, and my avatar, Mavrick Aero, has been busy trading virtual land around to get a cozy and contiguous 512 square meter plot for SelfReliant.

Here’s a shot of the new place to find SelfReliant in Second Life:

If you already have the free Second Life viewer installed on your computer, then please follow this SLURL to the Homestead:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Costard/52/16/26

I’ve built a custom avatar that looks just like the blue running character on our logo – his name? – you guessed it – BlueStairs; SelfReliant’s own mascot for Internet-empowered self-education. If you email me, comment on this blog, or send Mavrick Aero an in-world IM, and mention this blog post, you’ll receive a free BlueStairs avatar in Second Life! Always fun to have an alter-ego to play around with…

To everyone in my life who has shown me love and friendship, I wish you Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

The new year is a great time to reflect on how to become more self-reliant and productive online, and I know that 2009 will be an amazing year of growth.

My resolution this year is to publish more intellectual content – public homework if you will – on the academic subjects that interest me most deeply. I’ll be doing this work under the aegis of SelfReliant’s new Microenterprise Institute or MEI, but you can work on your intellectual journey within almost any context you choose.

Take care,

Alex

So the other day I was showing my new consulting client the graphic that I’d put together to describe how the knowledge economy actually shares some similarities with agrarian economies, in the sense that knowledge ‘grown’ on the Internet has a very predictable and organic lifecycle.  With the assistance of the little blue guy in SelfReliant’s new logo, I put together a digital version of this lifecycle that I’d like to discuss here.  But first the graphic:

Tapping into online feedback to learn organically off your ideas

The way this graphic is arranged, I’m trying to fit the definition of a microenterprise in, and if you’re familiar with my website at www.SelfReliantLLC.com then you know there’s aready a link to this graphic on my Microenterprise Institute page.  Basically, my argument is that everything you might want to learn can be self-taught to you by engaging in a process not unlike farming.

Here’s a recap of that 4-step process:

1) Start out with an idea or question as your “Seed”.  This could be anything:  How did they build the Hadron Super Collider?  What would happen if I made cyberpunk art out of pasta?  What’s the meaning of life?  Why are cellular automata important?  How could we measure gravity waves?

2) “Plant” the Idea Online.  This is the essence of every good microenterprise.  The moment you utilize the broader Internet to plant your ideas into the public consciousness, interesting things will grow.  You don’t have to write a term paper to do this – the inversion is essentially this:  instead of attention coming before quality, the Internet rewards quality by giving it attention.  And hopefully, at some point, official accreditation as well.  So write a blog, do research for a high quality Wikipedia article, build an Internet business that sells your unique art, and start doing all your “homework” outside of class, in public, and online.

3) “Harvest” the Fruits of those Ideas.  When your ideas are public, they can be evaluated.  There are of course credible evaluators and non-credible evaluators.  A Harvard-trained psychology researcher is a credible evaluator of your blog post on neuroscience.  A 6-year old would be a non-credible evaluator.  So aggregate the feedback you get from credible sources and develop new ideas or questions to explore from that feedback.  Other benefits include experience with the particular technological medium or platform you used, and of course money.

Some online ‘gurus’ will emphasize how Internet marketing can make you thousands of dollars.  There is no doubt it can, and generating your own income from any source is empowering – and will make you more self-reliant, and able to fund your ideas and your self-education.  Bottom line:  We’re all for you making money online!  But don’t lose sight of the fact that making money online should always be a byproduct of your intellectual journey, not a focus of it.  This is where SelfReliant’s core values come into play – financial independence is one of our core values, but profit in the absence of the other values, such as intellectualism and caring, would be a shallow success in our view.

So once you come full circle, you’ll of course have to sift the good ideas from the bad, and once again farm out some new knowledge from the Internet.  Self-education is the only kind of education that allows for informal learning to matter toward your resume, credibility, and reputation.  Get farming!

Alright – so as an interlude between Parts 2 and 3 of my bloated ‘Chronicles of Me’ – let’s talk about some cool stuff:  a piece of software, a piece of hardware, and some cold hard (virtual world) cash.

So first off, I wanted to let everyone know that SelfReliant is now up and running on Twitter; you can check it out now at http://twitter.com/selfreliant.  The value of a tool like Twitter for self-education is that little things you do every day contribute to your learning, and it really does help to document them for others to evaluate

For example, let’s say you’re on Google Scholar, reading up on cutting edge solar cell research.  Let me find a real (and free) paper so everyone knows I’m not making this up.  Ah, here we go:  http://isis.ku.dk/kurser/blob.aspx?feltid=60426 So let’s say that you want everyone in your social network to know that you’re reading this particular paper.  You Twitter off your laptop or mobile device a quick note reviewing the research, and a permanent record is made of your activities.  This activity stream will come in quite handy if you apply for a position with a green tech company, and they would like some sort of proof of your ongoing interest and self-education in the field of solar cells.

So in the case of the SelfReliant Twitter stream, much like the delicious Bookmark stream, stakeholders in SelfReliant will be able to see in real-time what I’m doing to build the company up.  So whereas they may have to check the blog weekly to see updates, or check the SelfReliantLLC.com monthly for new content, the Twitter stream will more likely than note be updated more than once a day – because each entry is just so short and pithy.  So get on Twitter if you haven’t already, it’s an excellent tool for documenting your learning for others to comment on.

OK – so moving right along to this very exciting X-Prize of the virtual world – the creators of the virtual world Second Life, Linden Lab, have just announced that they’ll be accepting applications for a $10K prize.  The award will go out to whichever SL resident is best able to create a program for SL that connects the virtual world with the real world.  Also, this is going to be annual, which is great, because I’d love to enter but probably won’t have a project ready in time for this year’s competition.  Check out the Linden Prize details here:  http://lindenlab.com/lindenprize

And finally, I’m picking up on a new computer hardware trend here and was reading about Windows Home Server, and the HP Home MediaServer that it runs on.  The main reason why the rise of personal servers is interesting is because it represents competition for the ‘cloud’ – which is a common Internet term referring to the array of storage and processing capacity users can tap into on platforms like Google, Yahoo, and Amazon.  This is often free excess storage space that is housed on massive external server farms; the backbone of the Internet.

So what would happen if households, neighborhoods, and other small groups became even more empowered and self-reliant by managing servers of their own?  Not just for media…but for running their own ‘mini-Internet’ – hardly a corporate ‘intranet’ that could get hacked, this would be physically separate connectivity.  Nobody can possibly hack into a set of computers that has no connection to the web.  And what if the broader Internet is too scary of a place for young children.  If parents are controlling their own server, then they can make their own Internet just for their kids, where only web pages and content of their choosing exists in a static state.

In the context of a slightly larger entity, for example, a neighborhood, a dedicated server might be really helpful.  Everyone in the neighborhood would know that their communications were not part of the broad Internet ‘cloud’, but rather hosted on a shared, neutral, space that has absolutely no physical or wireless connection to the rest of the Internet.

Also – when you control the server – you don’t need broadband, because everything you’d like to access is right there in your home, completely inaccessible to hackers and other unscrupulous data sniffers.  In fact, it would make sense that in the future we’ll routinely head to muni wifi, wimax, or coffee shops with free broadband Internet, pull down tons of interesting content onto our harddrives, and then return home and image it onto our home servers for later reading.  Are you thinking that Internet security isn’t a big deal right now?  How many of you have personal information online?  How much time in your life will you spend creating, remembering, entering, and resetting passwords and other security-related keys in order to get to that information?  My guess is pretty much everyone understands that burden now all too well.

So whereas the ‘cloud’ provides us each a virtualized self-reliance over our data, running our own home ‘mini-Internet’ by using a physical data server will make that self-reliance a physical, hardware-enabled reality.  Oh, here are some crucial supporting links on that for those interested:

http://www.popularmechanics.com/blogs/technology_news/4216337.html
http://www.hp.com/united-states/campaigns/mediasmart-server/

Any thoughts?

As a sophomore at Duke I had a somewhat immature attitude about the way intellectualism should be infused back into higher education.  The Duke Renaissance Society and IdeaNet programs were conceived as a way to hold up some members of the student community as “shining examples” of creative, innovative, and occasionally rebellious intellectual thinkers – and give them some power to shape student culture. It would not be unfair to characterize those programs as elitist in retrospect.  I know now that intellectualism in the 21st century has a far broader and more exciting definition than I originally thought.

A single entity, especially a student group, can’t really force culture or a cultural “agenda.”  Larry Moneta, Duke’s VP of Student Affairs once told me, student culture is a reflection of broader cultural, economic, and even political trends.  Even if you can influence them, it’s better to understand those trends, work with them, and add value to them, than to work against them.  He also advised me to give athletics a fair shake – and I’ve since come to recognize its value for personal improvement, health and wellness, and self-reliance.

With IdeaNet’s business plan gathering dust, I returned to Duke as a junior.  I’d taken some time off at that point, and my new outlook was decidedly less cynical.  I focused on my classes and decided to major in Biology, a subject I’d been passionate about in high school and which had led me to work in a college-level developmental biology laboratory as a high school senior.  It was also at this time that I met Carolyn Meyer, the love of my life.  We just celebrated 3 years together and were engaged last Easter just before I graduated from Duke.

Around this time I also focused more inwardly, and on my long-term goals.  What would my career be?  What am I most passionate about?  Where would my particular talents best be put to use?  How can I best make my ideas and values matter in the world?  It was a time for good existential reflection and planning for sure.

The answers to these questions always revolved around the Internet, education, intellectual property, and finance, which had become my main passions alongside molecular biology while at Duke.  So in the interest of enriching myself and learning to use the Internet, I began exploring Web 2.0 in earnest.  The first place I started was online bookselling behemoth, Amazon.com.  The goal:  sell all the used books in my dorm room, and then offer to sell other students’ used textbooks for a slim profit.

In order to make the entrepreneurial effort a bit more ‘official’, I came up with the name Collegiate Internet Resale and set up shop on Amazon, listing all the titles in my own dorm room just to get the hang of the software and start generating cash.  This was one of my first serious ‘microenterprises’ online and the result was certainly some profit, but ultimately, a business education experience that would have been difficult to get out of a textbook or in a classroom.  I also noticed that working on CIR was a low risk and low barrier-to-entry activity.  It was operating on such a small scale that it might as well have been an in-class simulation rather than a real-world endeavor.

That’s when something startling became crystal clear to me.  The Internet is not merely a resource, it is an evolving artificial social space where almost any form of interaction could be sculpted out for the public to engage.  What was being referred to as ‘Web 2.0′ was a set of technologies that was fundamentally social, and because of this I began to understand how the Internet would slowly alter and reinvigorate our oldest educational, financial, and governmental institutions by making them more inclusive, and involving more people in their work.  Futurist thinker and renowned author Alvin Toffler wholeheartedly concurred with my thinking in his book, Revolutionary Wealth, which I now refer to everyone I meet.

So how do you go from selling a few textbooks on Amazon to seeing Web 2.0 as a massive catalyst for educational change?  It’s all about the changing nature of real-world experiences in the 21st century.  A crucial part of the definition of education is tied up in a social norm of ‘quality’ knowledge.  So as you progress through the grades and move to ‘higher’ education, you are being asked to prove as a student that you are reaching for this socially approved definition of quality.  This underlying fundamental of education will never change – it’s called accreditation and it’s crucial not only to measuring success but to communicating student quality to other members of our global society.  I say that it will not change simply because it is part of any definition of education.  Learning can occur without accreditation, but education cannot.

So getting back to 21st century experiences, we see that the documentation of the human experience can now be more complete than ever before in human history.  Every cell phone text message, webcam video, or book sale on Amazon is recorded on massive, secure, backed up server farms.  The real world economy is so saturated by recording devices that everything we do could conceivably be accredited against our socially accepted notion of ‘quality knowledge’.  Write a blog on the ante-bellum South?  Take photos to sell online as stock photography?  All these actions are recorde evidence of your own self-education journey; no classroom required.  A Harvard professor seeking to award a Masters degree ought not to have to review the work of only his graduate students, but rather the entire opus of output on the Internet.

Going to any sort of physical location to become educated is almost more antiquated than the use of curricula, tests, homework, and artificial deadlines to teach.  As I turned to new technologies like the virtual world of Second Life, I found that I could learn from Australian professors in my free time, one of which I still maintain contact with.  Of course that learning went unaccredited by Duke and the rest of academia, just as this blog will – but it doesn’t have to be that way.

In my next and final post on SelfReliant’s intellectual ‘history’, I’ll discuss how I ended up transitioning to economics, and embarking on the writing project that currently occupies my time…

SelfReliant was not where I started as an educational entrepreneur, it was where I ended up.  The following 3-part series, which will be eventually converted into a YouTube online video – discusses the path that led to SelfReliant’s founding in September 2007.

If you want to understand how I got to “self-reliance” as my theme for educational change in the 21st century, I’d have to explain my first year at Duke University as an undergraduate.  As a freshman, my mind overflowed with cool ideas about how I could connect with students, professors, and researchers.  The density of talent is literally overwhelming at places like Duke.  But step outside your dorm room, and some days you wouldn’t even know it was the case.  Arbitrary and unnecessary stress was a feeling that had been familiar to many of my fellow students who had come to Duke from “pressure cooker” boarding schools like Exeter or Andover, or elite charter schools, and this daily stress was once again the order of the day at an institution like Duke.

And this was not the kind of positive internal stress that gave focus to personal goals.  As I entered into Duke I saw brilliant minds boxed in and locked down; beholden to insane schedules, GPA requirements, pressure from parents, and frustration with often arbitrarily difficult curricula.  Intellectual life at Duke was a shambles, and in fact had been that way for many years.  I discovered this very much on my own, by using my free time to comb through some of the oldest records of the University:  The Duke University Archives.

The archives were amazing, fascinating sources of information for me.  I learned about the secret societies Duke had played host to – the Red Friars and the White Duchy, of which Elizabeth Dole had been a member.  I learned that Duke Presidents had received written complaints from students for decades, since the 60s, about the lack of real intellectual interest and class cohesion among students.  I read about Duke administrators valiantly attempting to spend money on architectural fixes for the intellectual life problem – meaning that they literally were spending millions of donor dollars on “collaborative” buildings and spaces, that they believed could cure a jaded and disinterested culture of “Organization Kids” – See David Brooks’ famous article by the same name for some context:  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200104/brooks.  There had to be a better way.

As a sophomore at Duke, I enrolled in a class that changed my life.  Tony Brown’s Enterprising Leadership course at the Sanford Public Policy Institute was my first brush with a growing trend in higher education known as “experiential learning.”  The idea was simple – develop a social enterprise and launch it from the class, potentially continuing it well after the course was done.  Your grade was given on the basis of your project’s rigor, and the degree of learning perceived to have taken place by Tony.  Having already discerned a solution to Duke’s intellectual life problem, I enrolled with a full plan in mind.  I called it, The Duke Renaissance Society , and it was originally supposed to be a return to a sort of secret society, minus the secret.  Basically, I wanted to create a lobbying group of students who wanted to play the role of “educational innovator” and ultimately solve the problem of anti-intellectualism by making creative inquiry cool, but also a bigger part of the normal day-to-day outside-of-class experience at the University.  Of course, this group would also be semi-elite because in my mind, it would give other students something to shoot for.  I’d find students with perhaps dismal GPAs who were spending their free time reading Kant instead of going to class.  Or artists frustrated with the art department, computer geeks hacking Linux or incubating a couple dozen startup ideas.  Rebel geniuses – diamonds in the rough.  And they would comprise the DRS, as I was quick to acronymize it.

Over the course of the class though, the DRS didn’t sell well and my fellow social entrepreneurs wanted to know just what my group would actually do rather than just who would comprise it.  It was also suggested that a “Renaissance Society” evoked images of people wearing odd pants, riding horseback, and having archery contests.  So, after partnering with a student who was most sympathetic to my cause, Meenakshi Chivukula, we renamed the project IdeaNet.

Now at this second iteration, IdeaNet was conceived of as a student group that would essentially provide resources to other student groups on campus.  My preference at the time was to empower the “nerdier” groups, like the Word Club, which played Scrabble regularly, rather than sports-related groups.  The idea morphed into a sort of student-run consulting firm for the floundering to non-existent intellectual culture on campus.  My leaning toward exclusion of less intellectual student organizations was an outgrowth of the fact that I have always thought learning was fun – not a chore.  Apparently many elite university students don’t share this feeling, and how could they after years of treating academic achievement as a crushing rat race for grades and instructor approval?  Unfortunately though for us, IdeaNet would never officially launch at Duke…

That’s it for Part 1 of what I hope to be a series of posts over the next week.  Looking forward to your comments.